A senior manager of Germany’s Federal Employment Agency (BA) has said there is only limited capacity for the national job market to absorb new migrants, and it is already significantly overstretched.
Speaking to a club meeting of Hamburg business journalists, BA board member and former left-wing political senator Detlef Scheele said the job market could absorb 350,000 new working age migrants a year — half of the 700,000 new jobs created in total annually.
Yet over 1.5 million migrants arrived in Germany last year, with 1.1 million registering for asylum.
Mr. Scheele’s comments support, and may even go further than the figures seen in a leaked Federal document from 2015, which admitted the government was expecting at least new 400,000 welfare claimants last year from the migrant crisis. The BA October migration estimate paper forecasted Germany was to receive over one million unskilled migrants that year.
It said 80 per cent of arrivals were under the age of 45 and have no qualifications at all, not even to high-school level. Just eight per cent had any kind of academic qualification such as a university degree.
The agency estimated catering for the new claimants would cost at least €855 million in 2016.
Dealing with the new influx of trainees being prepared for work in Germany at the expense of the tax payer is proving challenging, and many bodies are clamouring for more support from the government, reports Die Welt.
This is not the first time Mr. Scheele has spoken out on the job prospects of migrants.
Speaking last week he said 350,000 migrants would go directly on benefits and that “we should not have too high expectations” of migrants finding work in general. He said: “If things go well, maybe ten percent in the first year after entry will have a job, after five years, half, after 15 years 70 percent”, as reported at the time by Breitbart London.
Follow Oliver Lane on Twitter: Follow @Oliver_Lane or e-mail to: olane@breitbart.com
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